SCOM- The monitoring OG
We use SCOM to provide enhanced monitoring to our customer's Windows servers as a managed hosting service. Proactive monitoring is the …
Microsoft System Center Operations Manager (SCOM)
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What is Microsoft System Center Operations Manager (SCOM)?
Microsoft's System Center Operations Manager (SCOM) is a monitoring and application performance management option, with the core datacenter and cloud-based systems monitoring.
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- Threshold alerts (22)10.0100%
- Server availability and performance monitoring (21)10.0100%
- Database monitoring (22)9.090%
- Server usage monitoring and capacity forecasting (21)8.080%
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What is Microsoft System Center Operations Manager (SCOM)?
Microsoft's System Center Operations Manager (SCOM) is a monitoring and application performance management option, with the core datacenter and cloud-based systems monitoring.
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What is Microsoft System Center Operations Manager (SCOM)?
Microsoft's System Center Operations Manager (SCOM) is a monitoring and application performance management option. It supports both datacenter and cloud-based systems monitoring, and can recommend possible root causes or corrective actions when impactful thresholds are crossed on the monitored environment. SCOM also features adjustable thresholds for alerts, as well as a variety of prebuilt monitoring integrators with additional third-party integrators available.
Microsoft System Center Operations Manager (SCOM) Technical Details
| Operating Systems | Unspecified |
|---|---|
| Mobile Application | No |
Frequently Asked Questions
Microsoft's System Center Operations Manager (SCOM) is a monitoring and application performance management option, with the core datacenter and cloud-based systems monitoring.
Reviewers rate Threshold alerts and Server availability and performance monitoring highest, with a score of 10.
The most common users of Microsoft System Center Operations Manager (SCOM) are from Enterprises (1,001+ employees).
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December 30, 2023
SCOM- The monitoring OG
We use SCOM to provide enhanced monitoring to our customer's Windows servers as a managed hosting service. Proactive monitoring is the biggest business problem that SCOM addresses which reduces the potential incidents that a customer can have due to an outage that poses huge financial threats, especially during their peak business season or hours. We provide monitoring to thousands of customers who depend on their servers to run their critical apps seamlessly and usually, we resolve the issue before an outage occurs.
- Server Monitoring
- Network Monitoring
- Proactive Alerting
- Hardware Monitoring
- Cloud monitoring especially AWS/GCP
- Virtual appliances monitoring
- Slow web console/Operations console. Perhaps a full-fledged web console like MS Azure would be great.
System Center Operations Manager is used by our enterprise for Windows-based monitoring. It addresses multiple monitoring services, such as alerting for low disk space, high memory usage alerts, account creations, accounts being added or removed from groups, services stopping, and much more.
- Real-time monitoring for alerting
- Gathering performance counter resource usage
- Delegation of seeing only what you should see
- Creating custom alerts or monitors--all XML based
- Easier way to monitor non-Windows systems (e.g., RHEL)
Here System Center Operations Manager is being used across multiple departments.
System Center Operations Manager is a highly versatile and efficient monitoring tool which we are using to perform monitoring of our various servers and datacenter equivalent. We also generate performance analysis using System Center Operations Manager so we can predict when a certain resource will be exhausted and in this way we can plan for it accordingly.
The most amazing thing about System Center Operations Manager is that it is highly integrable with any other vendor hardware and software through what are called management packs. Using these management packs, which are readily available, one can monitor a large amount of hardware without worrying about the underlying vendor.
The second most amazing thing is that System Center Operations Manager alerts are highly customizable based on specific needs and requirements. We can granularly configure the alerts based on a wide variety of criteria and even create our own custom criteria, too. We can then create specific groups to forward the alerts to the relevant team so they can see it and take appropriate action promptly.
System Center Operations Manager is a highly versatile and efficient monitoring tool which we are using to perform monitoring of our various servers and datacenter equivalent. We also generate performance analysis using System Center Operations Manager so we can predict when a certain resource will be exhausted and in this way we can plan for it accordingly.
The most amazing thing about System Center Operations Manager is that it is highly integrable with any other vendor hardware and software through what are called management packs. Using these management packs, which are readily available, one can monitor a large amount of hardware without worrying about the underlying vendor.
The second most amazing thing is that System Center Operations Manager alerts are highly customizable based on specific needs and requirements. We can granularly configure the alerts based on a wide variety of criteria and even create our own custom criteria, too. We can then create specific groups to forward the alerts to the relevant team so they can see it and take appropriate action promptly.
- Management and monitoring of Windows as well as Unix/Linux platforms
- Remotely connect to Windows machines and perform administrative task from the console itself
- Even monitors DB applications like MS SQL and provides recommended steps to resolve
- Can create custom dashboards for the NOC team so they can monitor the datacenter with ease
- Unix/Linux platform monitoring is currently limited since this feature was recently introduced
- System requirements are a bit high, as opposed to other applications
- Could be more secure if System Center Operations Manager is introduced as a virtual appliance
May 06, 2021
Always best for Microsoft OS monitoring
It is used by IT infrastructure team to monitor server infrastructure including private cloud and server environment. Around 150 virtual server running on Hyper-V cloud as well as Virtual servers running on VMware VSAN . O.s includes most of Microsoft but some are Linux . We rely on SCOM for monitoring our server environment completely . Email alerts are configured for service owners and infrastructure team . Dashboard for mission critical servers for NOC team . And team wise dashboards .
- Agent based monitoring
- Management Packs . Best thing for monitoring particular service even when you have less knowledge of that service .
- Alerts and dashboard
- Custom MP creationn
- Availability of Management Packs
- custom deployment for Linux based machines specially SUSE linux
March 13, 2020
SCOM a good but dying product.
SCOM is used to monitor all our Windows servers and their services. Those include:
- AD
- SQL
- Exchange
- Azure
- Lync
- Office 365
- Windows 10
- Windows File Services
- Windows IIS
- Windows Servers
- DNS
It is currently critical to our Windows monitoring throughout the company. The fact that the SCOM licenses are included with SCCM licenses is a plus for us.
- AD
- SQL
- Exchange
- Azure
- Lync
- Office 365
- Windows 10
- Windows File Services
- Windows IIS
- Windows Servers
- DNS
It is currently critical to our Windows monitoring throughout the company. The fact that the SCOM licenses are included with SCCM licenses is a plus for us.
- Windows Server monitoring
- SQL
- AD
- Not much development. Seems like MS is not developing it anymore.
- Not so good with Linux.
- Hard to use with Azure.
December 11, 2019
System Center Review
We are using Microsoft Systems Center Operations Manager in our organization mainly for event management and monitoring. It is used for all the server infrastructure and services.
- Alerts.
- Integrates nicely with other Microsoft products.
- Some functions take time to process.
- Pricey for small business platforms.
It is being used across the whole organization. It provides ease of management and support for multiple devices across the network.
- Patch management.
- Operating system deployment and updates.
- Better patch management.
- Some functions are slow to process and real time stats delayed.
November 05, 2019
Good product to monitor your Microsoft landscape
Microsoft System Center Operations Manager is being used for our office automation department that manages not all, but many user-related services and servers. To be able to manage efficiently and monitor the landscape of servers, System Center Operations Manager is used and has been for a couple of years now. It is a big product so it mainly makes sense if you have quite a few servers and/or services to monitor.
- Customization option for monitoring are plenty, creating your own monitors.
- Integrates nicely with other Microsoft products.
- Steep learning curve.
- You can make a mess of your implementation too easily. Keep to best practices and get to know the product!
October 23, 2019
SCOM to manager all your systems
We are using Microsoft Systems Center Operations Manager in our organisation mainly for event management and monitoring. We are able to integrated Operations Manager with multiple systems from different vendors and can apply actions if appropriate. Along with this, we use Operations Manager with Squared Up to provide different teams with dashboards to provide clean views for their systems.
- Alerts
- Discovery
- Clarity events
- Ability to create dashboards
October 18, 2019
SCCM offers good value for all the functionality
We use SCCM for deploying all of our end user laptop\desktops. It is used across our entire organization.
- Patch Management
- Operating System Deployment
- Software Deployment
- better UI layout.
- OS deployment wizards are desperately needed
- better patch management
October 17, 2019
Good for Monitoring Windows Infrastructure
We are using it for the monitoring of our Windows infrastructure.
- Easy to use.
- Integrates well with other toolings.
- Reliable.
- Monitor user-experience.
- Increased automation functionality.
September 21, 2019
Lightweight and helpful product
SCOM helps us in many ways. According to the software and application that our institute needs, this helps you to check and monitor and give proper support to the dedicated application or software.
- Configuring the applications or software.
- After you setup an application or software it helps you to monitor the losses.
- It helps you in troubleshooting also.
- Its real-time status updates are a bit slow.
- Some functions take time to process.
- Other features are good there's nothing much that I've detected anymore on the basis.
SCOM is currently being used to manage and monitor Microsoft Windows, Linux/UNIX, and iSeries environments. It is currently used by the Infrastructure team to gain visibility over CPU, disk, network reach-ability. It is the de-facto monitoring system for the enterprise.
- Provides basic notifications for standard IT performance indicators
- Highly extensible with multiple visualization and functionality tools
- Integrates well with the Microsoft ecosystem
- Installation and basic functionality is complex to setup
- Basic agents still don't work with all UNIX/Linux flavors
- Out of the box visualization inadequate for larger installations
- Significant cost involved to upgrade visualization and functionality for other platofrms.
We installed and configured Microsoft System Center Operations Manager back in 2013 and have been using it ever since. We purchased both Microsoft SCCM and SCOM. Both take time to set up and configure properly for your individual environments. We are a small business with approximately 170 workstations and around 17 servers, so both products are a bit overkill for us, but it is really nice to have the technology that the big guys use and take advantage of all the power they provide to our IT Department. We use SCOM primarily as a watchdog to monitor servers and workstations and keep us abreast on how they are performing. It monitors processor and memory usage as well as hard drive storage consumption. It also lets us know if a server goes off-line and send us an email so we can attend to the issue proactively.
- Allows us to visualize our systems in a single interface and see the status of health as well as relevant performance metrics.
- A flexible and powerful interface with active alerting covering domain controllers, SQL servers, etc...
- Allows you to customize your views and workspaces for specific tasks and needs.
- Reporting is powerful and flexible.
- Pricey for small business platforms
- Setup and configuration are not intuitive for "unseasoned" IT professionals.
March 28, 2019
Great product
We use SCOM to manage all of our Microsoft servers and remote desktops. This includes all our of virtual servers, databases, and shared applications.
- System wide updates
- Management of all servers
- Remote user management
- At times it can be sluggish
- Crashes do not occur often but do happen several times a month, and sometimes must be manually restarted if nonresponsive.
- Remote desktops can become unresponsive although, perhaps, not SCOM directly.
March 23, 2019
SCOM Monitors Everything
It is our go-to when it comes to monitoring our entire data center. We have two data centers in active mode with more than 600+ servers and we have about 15 users using SCOM. I decided to implement SCOM because of its integration with virtual and physical servers, including SAN and network equipment from almost all the top brands. Another big plus for us were the workflows. You can create workflows so when SCOM detects an issue, it can auto execute tasks to solve the issue.
- We use it with network devices. It detects and alerts us when there is an IP conflict.
- It detects and alerts us when space is low on storage at the logical or physical level.
- It detects and alerts us when critical services have failed and we have created workflows to auto-resolve problems in a very systematic way.
- Microsoft needs to do a better job when it comes to wizards and configuring management packs.
February 01, 2018
Great monitoring extension for your System Center
System Center Operations Manager is used across IT departments of our organization. It provides monitoring capabilities for our on-premise infrastructure and part of Azure-based VMs across the VPN gateway. SCOM helps us to monitor our hosts 24*7 and address issues immediately when an alert is triggered. Flexible configuration of SCOM allows us to set different threshold for alert in prod and non-prod environments
- Windows Server monitoring
- SQL Server monitoring
- Integration with Operation Management Suite
- Linux monitoring could be better
- Possibility for agentless monitoring could be helpful in some cases, but it has a lot of limitation in SCOM
January 18, 2018
SCOM is the Bomb!
Our company just finished up a proof of concept of Systems Center Operations Manager. We are going to adopt SCOM for monitoring the health of our Team Foundation Servers and SQL Servers. We decided to take a look at SCOM due to some issues we had with our TFS Servers which resulted in severe latency throughout the system. We realized that we needed to get a better handle on monitoring the system health. Our goal is to have a holistic view of the system, to be able to predict and correct issues before they happen, or at the early warning signs of degradation. We need to be able to capture various performance metrics and retain a history to establish the baselines of what healthy looks like and understand when and why the system trends away from that healthy baseline. Keeping our development shops running at their top pace is vital to our business. TFS and SQL are the lifeblood of our SDLC, therefore the development teams efficiency rely on these systems. Long term goal is to roll out SCOM to other areas of the organization.
- The Health Explorer within SCOM is one of the more impressive features. How a system framework is monitored and when something goes wrong, it rolls up to the top level object and alerts the user. If there is a critical issue or warning, it rolls up to the system as a whole and the system will appear critical. You can use the Health Explorer to drill down and find the particular monitor that is in the critical state. From there you can see the details and where the problem lies. Whether it's from the event logs on the server or a performance threshold that has been triggered, you get all the information you need to troubleshoot quickly. When the issue is fixed, the overall system shows as healthy, again.
- When troubleshooting issues found through SCOM, you can add details to your company knowledge base within SCOM and tie that knowledge article to a particular monitor, which in turn adds the knowledge article to the alert that monitor eventually triggers. So, not only do you get some great, built-in troubleshooting information from the product you're monitoring, you also can build an additional company KB and that information will be right in the alert the next time that particular issue occurs. This makes troubleshooting infinitely quicker.
- The Management Packs that are applied to SCOM are what got us interested in using SCOM in the first place. We have a TFS Management Pack and a SQL Server management pack that we use. You can build custom Management Packs from scratch with SCOM, but having the framework in place for the systems we want to monitor out of the box, is a huge plus! Any customizations we want to do can be done on top of the Management Pack designed for the target system.
- One of the biggest drawbacks to SCOM is the sheer scope and complexity of the system. This can be a pro and a con. The system is very customizable, what you put into it is what you'll get out of it. That said, the learning curve is fairly steep. An organization needs to be committed to putting time and resources into SCOM to get the most out of it. I've heard stories from colleagues of several different companies that invested in SCOM and then abandoned it due to the excessive time and care required.
- SCOM is expensive. Not only is the enterprise licensing costly, SCOM requires it's own servers, operational and warehouse databases to be maintained.
- The OOB SCOM reports are a bit clunky and feel outdated.
December 01, 2017
For Large Windows Enterprises with Resources there is No Better Asset Management Tool
SCOM is essential in managing our 15,000+ desktops and 3,000+ laptops across our enterprise in 17 countries and over 30 locations. We do asset management, Windows and security updates patching as well as software deployment. Recently in the last two years we have been working on utilizing SCOM to also manage our enterprise servers across four data centers and have been migrating off WSUS to deploy updates and patches.
- SCOM can manage Windows OS systems from desktops to servers very well.
- SCOM is platform agnostic in that we manage physical and virtual machines with no differentiation.
- SCOM can quickly deploy emergency security patches and the best part is it can provide detailed results of success and failure rate of patch deployment.
- SCOM to increase performance and more robust high availability.
- Simplify dependent components (supporting servers and database).
- Better management interface and more robust roles setup for multiple IT support groups with detailed auditing enabled.
This is a System Center Operations Manager (SCOM) 2012 deployment used to monitor and support a four nodes Hyper-V cluster (Windows Server 2012 R2). The company uses it in conjunction with other System Center products, like Data Protection Manager and Virtual Machine Manager. All the production servers are virtual and running on the above solution (last count was over 100 virtual machines). SCOM is not in use for the management of workstations or clients.
- SCOM does excellent work in monitoring Microsoft Operating Systems and back-end solutions like Exchange and SQL Server. The information gathered is useful and the (free) management packs add in-depth counters and monitoring data.
- Agent deployment and updating, that with other solutions can be a complex task, is usually easy to perform. Also for endpoints that are in an external network or DMZ, a certificate based approach allows to get the result without requiring too high of a configuration effort.
- The product is also able to manage non-Microsoft platform and devices. The list of Management Packs is really long and covers many of the main players in the IT industry.
- SCOM requires a lot of fine tuning to be really usable, especially from an alerting point of view. The default thresholds are meant to be good for a generic scenario, but each IT department has to spend time in calibrating them on their specific needs.
- The most recent rollup updates have improved SCOM from all the points of view. Using it some time ago was not easy, due to a series of limitations and flaws (often I have seen agents going in "unknown state" with no motivation, just for example). I think that some companies have now a negative perception of Operations Manager due to this not so brilliant past.
- From a security point of view, SCOM requires some specific configurations. The required rules and permissions on firewalls, specifically, are something that usually requires some conversation and clarification with the network and security managers.
February 26, 2016
SCOM 2012 Review from a sort of smart guy.
We use SCOM to monitor our servers and network devices. It is used mainly by the technical IT staff. Other than the hardware, we also use it to monitor services and certain event log messages. We also use SA Vision Live Maps to visually represent our environment. There are several flat screen TVs in strategic areas (including our 24 hour help desk), that display the SA Vision Live Maps view. When a monitor goes red it is reflected in the Live Maps view and the appropriate team is notified.
For the network monitoring component we use Jalasoft Xian Network Manager which also works in conjunction with SCOM. We do not use the native SCOM network monitoring feature as Jalasoft does a better job of monitoring the network objects.
- SCOM in conjunction with SA Vision Live Maps makes it easy to create a visual dashboard of you environment. You can create hierarchical maps to represent your entire environment to a geographical scale and drill down when a problem arises.
- If you have an application that can send messages to an event log, you can easily create monitors and rules for specific errors that you care about and send those alerts as e-mails.
- SCOM is both agent and agentless so you have the option to get better monitoring by installing an agent. We have had few issues of a SCOM agent on a server.
- You need to stay on top of SCOM because you can easily bog down your performance if you are not constantly addressing problematic alerts, or a bad management pack.
- Network monitoring is there but compared to other SCOM plugins like Jalasoft, the Microsoft implementation is lacking. Jalasoft seems more straight forward and easier to implement.
- When your SCOM environment slows down you will need to open a Microsoft call and depending who you get, it can take weeks to address an issue. We currently have some issues that have been open for more than a month.
- SNMP monitoring is also not straight forward and you can't import MIBs.
February 25, 2016
SCOM - Bigger than the sum of its parts
We currently use SCOM within the IT Department to provide Event Alert Management across our whole server estate. Each sub team will have there own alerts and for me particularly as the DBA team we have the SQL packs installed to provide additional information about the Instances on servers. From my point of view we use this system primarily for Alert Management. We have it set up to send an email warnings when disk space is low and if an instance is offline and also for performance metrics that might need further investigation (such as high wait times).
- Centralised Reporting of Alerts/Warnings/Performance metrics - good when trying to provide an enterprise solution that all teams can use.
- Management packs can be installed for other products e.g. SQL Server and I believe some third party applications
- Can setup thresholds for alerts so you receive a warning before you receive a critical alert so you have time to avoid a system outage/issue
- Alerts can be sent via email or can use text service and we hook that into an automated phone system that will contact out of hours support and read the message for critical alerts.
- Can customise dashboards - we paid for consultancy to create a RAG (Red amber Green) dashboard for our 3 SQL environments (DEV/PROD/DR) for a quick one stop heads up for any issues.
- It is a monster of a system and really needs a person managing the system full time
- Options are a bit clunky especially when you need to set overrides.
- Takes a lot of time and effort to setup alerts as you want them, don't rely on the out of the box options you need to invest time into the system to get what you want out of it.
- Make sure you size the underlying database server/s correctly (Microsoft provide a tool to calculate based on number of objects you plan to collect data on), it is a datawarehouse underneath after all.
October 30, 2015
Best centralized monitoring platform!
In fact, we are developing custom monitoring solutions on the System Center Operations Manager(SCOM) platform for our customers and, of course, we are using it to monitor our IT infrastructure. So my feedback will include both parts. We have many cases, when SCOM helps our enterprise customers to address the following problems:
1. Address Availability and Performance issues of the hardware and software components of IT infrastructure (e.g. Exchange, SharePoint, SQL Server)
2. Monitor custom services, created inside organization.
3. Detect IT services outages and quickly resolve it
SCOM is not just a tool - it's IT monitoring platform with great extensibility options and it can solve much more problems with right customization.
- Microsoft workloads monitoring: SQL Server, Windows Server, Exchange and other Microsoft products.
- Data Visualization. With the custom dashboard capabilities, available in SCOM 2012 we can create advanced UI in SCOM console. One of the best examples there - SQL Server Monitoring Management Pack.
- Extensibility. This is very important feature, which allows end-users to add their custom monitoring scenarios using Powershell.
- Network monitoring. That is definitely not the strongest area of SCOM. Major competitors already doing it much better
- Performance and resource usage. First-time users can be very confused by the latency and resource consumption by console and server components
- New features. Last years SCOM couldn't demonstrate enough new features in new releases. I wish it has more.
October 30, 2015
SCOM or not to SCOM
We are using System Center Operations Manager 2012 R2 to manage and monitor our Windows and Linux platform as well as using SCOM APM to monitor multiple .NET and JAVA applications.
- Monitoring availability and performance of Windows Platform.
- Ability to set up alerts based on various and multiple conditions and situations.
- Performance trending and reporting.
- Its ability to identify what's happening within our .NET code via APM module.
- Upgrading and patching SCOM is always complicated and challenging, it can be improved.
- Console (thick client and web) performance need some attention, many of my SCOM users still won't log in and use the product because they hate the way it performs.
- 2012 R2 version is still lacking basic features like scheduled maintenance mode, although PowerShell scripts and third party tools can be used to achieve this, but I think any monitoring tool should have this ability out of the box.
October 28, 2015
Operations Manager from a System Center Expert
System Center Operations Manager is being used to monitor our Microsoft Windows, VMWare, HP hardware, and critical application environments. We have been successful in monitoring in-house applications as well products we have purchased through native, purchased, free (community) and in-house developed management packs. It is being used primarily by our IT organization, but we also have some people outside of IT that use System Center Operations Manager. We have used System Center Operations Manager to increase the stability and reliability of our IT organization as well as automatically correct issues it discovers.
- Windows OS Monitoring - Out of the box, System Center Operations Manager does a wonderful job of monitoring Windows Operating System health, performance and configuration. It provides detailed reports and the data required to quickly make technical decisions.
- Community - The System Center Operations Manager community is huge. It is rare that we need to purchase a third party application to use along with System Center Operations Manager. Because System Center Operations Manager has been around for quite a while, many experts in the community are available for writing and sharing advanced management packs and monitoring strategies.
- Flexibility - System Center Operations Manager provides the flexibility to perform any monitoring that has ever been requested of me. While the product is simple in its native form, it can be expanded with the authoring tool, add-ons, and visual studio authoring extensions.
- Network Monitoring - System Center Operations Manager provides network monitoring, but it is relatively new, clunky, and feature-poor. It is improving, but if you need to do advanced network monitoring, use a dedicated product.
- Consoles - System Center Operations Manager has two consoles - the web console and the desktop console. Both can be slow at times, even with a healthy back end. It has never been a huge problem, but when you are moving quickly, you can sometimes be caught up waiting a couple of seconds here or there.